People increasingly rely on the Internet for business and personal use. Unfortunately, the Internet has become a major vector for malware propagation. While Internet users may reduce the risk of encountering malware by only visiting reputable Internet sites, the ever-growing volume of Internet sites, including many niche sites, may mean that user wariness is impractical as a total solution.
Unfortunately, traditional attempts by security vendors to identify malicious Internet sites may also suffer from significant deficiencies. For example, some security vendors may track and analyze uniform resource locators to identify potentially malicious sites. However, malware distributors may constantly create new uniform resource locators with modified content, potentially frustrating any attempt to maintain comprehensive blacklists. Furthermore, techniques such as crawling web sites may not scale well and may be subject to evasion when a malicious uniform resource locator serves benign content to certain requestors (e.g., address ranges belonging to security vendors) and malicious content to others.
Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies and addresses a need for additional and improved systems and methods for assessing Internet addresses.